


The Fort Laramie Affair

by Delphi



Category: Magnificent Seven (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Drama, First Time, Infidelity, M/M, Sexual Identity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-04-16
Updated: 2005-04-16
Packaged: 2017-10-05 16:46:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/43850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Delphi/pseuds/Delphi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Judge Travis thinks back on twenty-six days in a Fort Laramie hotel room.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fort Laramie Affair

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for _The Third Kind_, an Ezra-centric anthology.
> 
> Quoted poetry is from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself."

There once was a man who fell in love with a boy.

That's the tale. That's all there is to tell.

It's a good story for lonesome nights. The winter ones, when my knee is aching and the wind always seems to be pushing me somewhere I don't want to be. Or maybe those humid August evenings when Evie's in her bed, and I'm in my own, and the heat curls up like a stranger beside me.

Always, I think that this time—finally, this time—the story's going to pass over my lips and into the night, out of my head forever. But it hasn't happened yet, and after four years, I'm finally starting to see that it probably never will. Lonesome nights keep on coming, and the story has haunted me down every coach line and dusty desert trail, through towns and cities, and once even over the ocean to London, until I've begun to think that my shadow must stretch back the whole long and winding road to Wyoming. It's that kind of ghost story.

On certain sleepless nights, I wonder: does it show on the outside, the change in me? Sometimes I'm certain it's there for all to see, that the gray in my hair and the lines around my eyes are something more than the stamp that's pressed onto every man who rides on from fifty-six to sixty. Do I even look like him anymore, that other Oren Travis, whose story was longer and simpler and maybe, when I think on it, a little sadder too?

Here's a good man—that other Oren's story would go—here's a man who's good by his own measure, and good by the measure of his community. This Oren Travis is sensible and even-tempered, and he's educated. Anyone can see that he loves his country and his wife and his son, and he loves his work, which is God's work. As a judge, he decides who is innocent and who is guilty. He sentences men to prison, and he sentences men to death, and if he's done his job right, then one is usually more of a mercy than the other. And, incidentally, in his first year as a circuit court judge, this Oren Travis gives a fifteen-year-old ranch hand five years for crimes against nature on a fourteen-year-old bunkmate in what's the sixth sodomy trial in an American court. He passes this verdict knowing there's a chance the boy won't survive his term; and if there's anything to feel bad about, it's only that he allows the whole mess to keep him up at night. Were he a truly good man, he knows, he would feel nothing but satisfaction for justice served.

Satisfaction...

Am I satisfied now?

There is a clothbound book of poems that comes with me on the road, and of all its sinful delights, I read this one most often—

_There is that in me...I do not know what it is...but I know it is in me.  
Wrenched and sweaty...calm and cool then my body becomes; I  
   sleep...I sleep long.  
I do not know it...it is without name...it is a word unsaid..._

—and I can't help but think maybe that's the way it should have stayed. Unnamed and unsaid, without the memory of taste or feeling to toss me in my sleep. Anonymous like those words on the page. I know the poet's name, but would I know him in the street? Maybe, if only for some knowing look that might pass between us.

All I know is that without the details, there is only a time and a place. Numbers and facts. They say that 40,000 soldiers died in the war, and I know I've hanged twenty-three men, and that a boy and I lived in sin for twenty-six days in a Fort Laramie hotel room. It's only with names, with faces, that the numbers become people. But even that's a lie, isn't it, because everyone is nameless and faceless to somebody in this world. I remember the boy's bare stomach, and the way a sweaty lock of hair clung to his brow, and I remember the strength in his arms. Does it really make it any easier to recall the name he gave me, the dreams he told me, the nightmares I watched him suffer; to have touched him, and tasted him, and known him in every way one man might know another? If it does, I know exactly what sort of disservice I'm doing to that ranch hand I locked away so long ago, and to his dark-eyed friend who cried in the witness box. And there, if I let myself feel something for them, are the four of us together somehow an exception to the laws of God and man?

After all this time, I still can't say.

The only thing I've learned from it all is how to make an island of myself, where those memories of Fort Laramie can only lap up on the shore. I might wade in on nights like this, my head above water, but at least I can climb up to higher ground when life calls me back to the places where I don't remember the smell of hotel sheets or the sound of my name in a honeysuckle voice.

But on nights like this...

Oh, on nights like this.

This is how it goes.

* * *

It's finally stopped raining, and the air is cool and sweet. We've just gotten to bed. It's our seventh night together, and our third night _together_, and I've finally gathered up the nerve to tell him that he's a wish come true.

"I was dreaming about someone just like you." My eyes are on the ceiling, and my face is on fire. "And then the door swung open, and you just took my breath away. I thought I was still dreaming."

And when I dare to glance at him, Ezra is smiling, and I already know him well enough to see that he doesn't believe me. Instead of trying to convince him, I kiss him, still thrilling inside at the simple fact that I can.

What I don't tell him is that it was a birthday wish. I don't need him asking my age, and I want even less to know his. I suspect he might be younger than Steven, a thought that unsettles me to no end. But I sidestep around the notion, reminding myself that my son has always been young for his age, a dreamer, and that in terms of pure cynicism, Ezra and I seem to be on equal footing. It seems justification enough when Ezra's the one nuzzling at my hand like a cat, the tip of his tongue darting between my fingers.

I touch his lips, his cheek, his throat, and then he wraps an arm around me and pulls me down to lie with my head on his chest. His fingers comb through my hair, and I smile to myself like a lovesick fool.

What were those daydreams to what came after? Nothing. Wisps of smoke, whispers I could barely understand. Pictures on a page. It was a certain painting on my mind, the night the storm blew Ezra into my life. _Youth in Field_, in the middle of a brick of a book on Renaissance art that Amos Johnson at the Hagersville bookshop had ordered in from Boston. It showed a boy, barely a man, reclining bare as the day he was born in a field of green grass and little wildflowers. His hair was glossy black curls that shone in the sunlight, and his eyes were green, and his lips were the color of red wine. But the colors weren't what I was remembering. I was thinking instead about the youth's plump hips, and the delicate smudge of his nipples, and the way his cock lay on his pale thigh.

That was how I celebrated my fifty-sixth birthday, riding a shift in the empty Fort Laramie guardhouse as a favor to a friend, getting good and flustered behind the desk while outside the worst thunderstorm in memory battered at the door. I was thinking about the ten dollars the book cost me, and how Evie was so proud to have a husband who appreciated a little culture, and how that youth in the field didn't have a speck of hair on his body, not anywhere.

And then the door blew open.

"I looked like something the cat dragged in," Ezra mutters.

"You looked..." I falter, sighing against his chest. He strokes the back of my neck.

He was soaking wet from the rain. A boy of twenty or twenty-five, bare to the waist, handcuffed and slung up between two equally soaked enlisted men. He wasn't struggling, but the soldiers had a good grip on either side of him, and he was shivering, his boots squelching on the floor. His hair was plastered to his scalp, and when he staggered over the threshold, I thought he was a drunk at first. Then his green eyes met mine, clear and resigned.

It wasn't that he looked much like the boy in the painting, not really. But there was something there, something that made me hesitate. I didn't hold stock with pretty young men in those days. They made me uncomfortable. But this one gave me pause.

"Got a live one here, Judge Travis," one of the soldiers announced, a scrawny, whey-faced corporal with a voice like a knife on a whetstone. "Civilian, but the jail's full up."

The other one, a thickset fellow, peered around. "Where's Captain Keats, sir?"

I'd sent Andy on his way a few minutes earlier after an hour of listening to him fret about whether his roof and his young wife were going to hold up all right in the storm, and I told the men so as they cuffed one of their prisoner's wrists to the bars of the nearest cell.

"Picked him up at Sutler's for gambling, sir. Can we leave him with you?" The scrawny one tossed a black satchel that I assumed was the prisoner's onto the desk. Both were rubbing their hands together and stomping their feet, looking like they wanted nothing more than a cup of coffee, or better yet a shot of whiskey.

"I think I can handle this one," I said dryly. The boy was trembling so violently that he looked like nothing so much as a newborn kitten.

"So p-pleased to make your acquaintance, g-gentlemen," he called out to the departing soldiers through chattering teeth, and one of them chuckled, muttering something that might have been "good luck."

The door slammed shut behind them, and it was suddenly very quiet without the storm blasting in. The boy was looking at me with eyes like mirrors, taking everything in and giving nothing up but my own reflection. I found myself straightening my tie.

"You got a name, boy?"

He blinked as water dropped out of his hair and into his eyes. The pause I would think on later, but after a moment he said, "Ezra, Ezra Simpson...sir."

A southerner, which went some ways in explaining why he'd been brought in on such paltry charges. The fort was run on chance gambling laws; a man was in the clear so long as he could prove he had an equal chance of winning or losing, and it didn't take a judge to see that this boy certainly hadn't been winning.

He shook again from head to toe, and I could see the goosebumps prickling up all over him.

"Well, Ezra Simpson," I said, rising and pulling his satchel across the desk towards me. "Anything in here that's going to bite me?"

He actually paused to think on it, and then he shrugged. "Wouldn't wager on it."

I had to laugh at that, guiltily tearing my eyes away from him. "Well, forgive me for not taking your say-so when it comes to betting. Unless, of course, you lost your shirt to a stiff breeze. Have you got another in here?"

He nodded, and it didn't take much rummaging through the half-empty bag to find it. The shirt was white, fine material, not much protection against a Wyoming autumn. He would have soaked it right through, so I handed him my handkerchief and tried not to watch so closely as he wrung out his hair and toweled off his chest.

"I would have won it back," he muttered.

I raised an eyebrow. "Pardon?"

"I would have won my shirt back eventually," he said a little louder, pulling the other one over his free arm and then frowning.

I sighed and unlocked the cuffs for a moment, keeping a hand on my gun. He changed his shirt quickly and let me cuff him again without a fuss.

"Eventually," he said again, a note of tiredness almost inaudible behind his bravado. "And likely my opponent's as well."

"Good for you. I don't suppose you would have won yourself twenty dollars for bail, too?"

He gave a small, bitter laugh. "I suppose I would have." And then he smiled, and I forgot how to breathe for a moment.

"So why didn't you leave me there?" Ezra asks. His voice is small, just enough to fill the scant space between us.

I think for a moment about what he wants to hear. "It was freezing," I finally say. "I wouldn't have left a dog in there."

"Ah," he says, and I can hear his smile just as surely as he can hear what I'm not saying.

It had been freezing. The boy was rubbing his cheeks dry on his shoulders as I continued to sort through his things. Another shirt, no warmer than the last. A waistcoat. A few pairs of suspenders, socks, and one of those itty bitty little two-shot derringers. Soft, silky material fluttered under my fingers, and it took a surreptitious little peek to see that they were drawers. I flushed hot without really knowing why.

Then I made a decision. The foolish kind.

"Can you read?" I heard myself ask, and the question obviously took Ezra equally by surprise.

"Of course," he scoffed, sounding offended, but I'd seen men dressed fancier than him who couldn't do much more than scratch their mark.

"And cipher?"

He nodded, looking curious now. It struck me, at the time, that he had more poise under arrest and shivering with the damp than any man I'd ever seen. He stood at ease, as if he weren't even cuffed, and stared back at me every bit as appraisingly as I stared at him.

"Not that I'm not eager to get into my nice warm cell," Ezra said, "but is there a point to this little interrogation?"

"Mind your manners, boy," I chided, smiling. God help me, I liked him. "This is your lucky day."

"You didn't have to offer me a job," Ezra murmurs. I'm beginning to learn that he isn't used to people doing kindly by him.

I shrug, and I twist around to pull the quilt up over us both. "I told you, the army clerk they gave me could barely count on his fingers. Besides, it's piss-poor pay, and you're still nineteen dollars in debt."

"I wouldn't be, if you'd let me go back to the cellar at Sutler's store. I'd even win a shirt for you. Something silk."

"I'll pretend I didn't hear that," I say, patting his side. "I don't need you getting into any more trouble."

That silences him for a moment. Then, so quietly that I scarcely hear it: "You didn't have to take me back with you."

"No," I say, and I give him a squeeze around the middle. "But I'll tell you, I'm glad I did."

He could have stood up in the guardhouse cell, but just maybe. It was five feet, nine inches high, with barely enough room for a man to hold one arm out at his side. He probably would have had to sit up all night on the wet stone floor, soaking whatever parts of him weren't already damp, and they said that a private had died of a fever in that cell not a week before.

So what else could I do?

I gave him my overcoat as we left, and I scribbled a note for Andy. And if my jacket was sopping through on the way back to the hotel, I surely never noticed. I was suddenly a damned sight warmer than I'd been in a long time.

* * *

"Oren?" Ezra asks suddenly. His breathing was so quiet, and it's the first clear night. I thought maybe he was going to be able to sleep.

"Hm?"

"It's not so late."

"Mm-hm?" I like the mischief in his voice.

"Are you too tired to...?"

And funnily enough, I'm not too tired to, so I start petting his hip, and I feel him stir. I've always waited for him to ask so far, always made certain he really wants it. But when he's asked, I've not been slow to give in.

It wasn't how it might have seemed to someone looking in through my hotel room window. Not the first night, nor the second and third, nor even the fourth, when he kissed me. I'm sure no one in the fort thought anything of me putting up my new clerk, a shared bed being better than no bed at all to military men and travelers on the road. He wore his drawers, and I wore my nightshirt, and we kept the sheet between us. It was a good-sized bed, and there was room enough for us to lie side by side without hardly even touching.

But I looked at him a long while when we tucked in for the night, and he at me. I know now that he was likely sizing me up, waiting to see whether I was going to ask for anything more than his learning in exchange for his parole. At the time, though, I only thought he was a boy and a little nervous of overstepping his bounds, and so I gave him a fatherly pat on the head and told him to get some shut-eye because I was going to work him hard in the morning.

He fell asleep soon enough, but I found myself lying awake in the dark for an hour or more. My heart was beating quick as a jackrabbit's, and it hurt every time I tried to swallow. I was excited, though I didn't quite understand why, and whenever Ezra stirred in his sleep, my stomach twisted. I listened to his breathing, how sometimes he breathed out through his nose and sometimes through his mouth, and I listened to his stomach's curmurrring and resolved to buy him a hearty breakfast in the morning.

Then I listened to his first nightmare. The one that started out quiet, with him mouthing words too faint to hear. The one that made him gasp and let out a great, shuddering breath. The one that made him shake—though I could feel through the sheet how warm he was—and whatever he started muttering was lost to the steady tap of the rain on the windowpane. A flash of lightning lit up the room for a split-second, and I could see his face twisting up in agony.

"Hey...boy?" I whispered, trying to remember if it was nightmares or sleepwalking that you weren't supposed to wake a man from.

But my voice was dwarfed by the sudden boom of thunder, and Ezra went stock-still and whimpered. The only word I could make out was "cannon," but that was enough.

Tentatively, I rolled over onto my side and gently laid my hand on his shoulder. He was stiff all over, but as soon as I touched him he seemed to melt back into the blankets. I could see by the dim reflection off the pale storm-light that his eyes were open but unseeing.

"Go to sleep, soldier," I said, and he closed his eyes.

A few moments later, so did I. When I woke up the next morning, he was in my arms.

* * *

Ezra sighs as I scoot up to hold him. I like this too, the feeling of a man's body wrapped around mine. Hard and strong and smelling just right, a flat chest pressed right up against my own. We lie like that for a long while, his arms around my neck and mine around his waist.

This is how we were, that first morning, when I woke up hard as a rock with Ezra sleeping sweet and deep beside me.

What I mean is that he could have kissed me that morning, if that was his game. Or the second night, when he nightmared again, or the third, when he came to bed without his drawers on and I was up until the small hours listening to his bare skin rubbing up against the sheet.

Instead, he had three days to learn that I was as good as my word. I took him down to the courthouse and introduced him to Andy as my new clerk, and I laid out the whole mess of Indian treaties that had brought me to Fort Laramie to begin with. The government was trying to negotiate with the Cheyenne and Lakota behind the Shoshones' backs and needed all the precedent it could find to keep uprisings to a minimum. Ezra quickly proved that he could in fact read and write quite well and, unlike me, didn't even move his lips when he did figures.

We talked. A lot. I told him about Evie, who was in Four Corners for the month, helping Steven take care of the baby while Mary recovered from influenza. We talked about Indians, and the war in the careful, roundabout way that civilized men did in those days. He told me about his mother who was living in Paris, recently married to a stepfather that Ezra hadn't even met. We played rummy in the evenings, and he let me win so obviously that I ordered him to stop, and he whupped me soundly each time after that.

And I think I might have been happy just like that. If every night had been about Edgar Allen Poe, and just what breeding makes the best racing horse, and old Irish folktales that our grannies had once told us.

He had to have known that I was happy. He didn't have to give me anything else. He just had to take what he wanted.

_"Oh God, Oren..."_

I'll never forget the taste of him.

The fourth night, he slid into bed naked again. It was early, maybe half-past eight, but the steady rain had made it seem like evening all day. I was tired and could have done with a drink, but they wouldn't have let Ezra into the officers' club and the saloon where the enlisted men gathered was a little too rambunctious for me.

We had hauled up some wood from the hotel cellar and got a good fire going before turning in. I dozed on and off, and thought that maybe it would be a peaceful night, but around midnight the storm gathered up its strength for a final beating.

Lightning flashed and thunder growled like a wild dog, and it didn't take long for Ezra to be thrashing around with his demons again, kicking me and moaning low in his throat. He rolled towards the edge of the bed, looking for all the world like the slightest motion would topple him to the floor.

"Oh, God..."

So I did the only sensible thing there was to do. I hauled him over to my side of the bed, dragged him on top of me, and wrapped my arms tight around him.

Now, my hands have held guns and they've held the gavel, but they've never held much comfort, and I could only hope I was doing some good in wrangling the twisted sheet out of the way and stroking Ezra's bare back like I would have done for a spooked hound. He shifted and shivered under my touch, making me feel every bit as helpless as when my son was a bawling infant, and Evie, at her wits' end, would thrust him into my care. Some strange, wild creature squirming in my arms with troubles I couldn't even begin to imagine.

"Hush, son," I whispered to him. "It's all right now. I've got you."

It didn't take me long to realize that there wasn't any way of making my touch as smooth as Ezra's skin. He was as soft as a woman, silky and inviting, but hard underneath too, all solid muscle and bone that I suddenly couldn't help tracing with curious fingertips, following the gentle arch of his spine; and even if somewhere along the way I maybe noticed that Ezra was quieting, I kept on stroking him all the same.

I heard Ezra sniff and wondered if he was blinking back tears in the dark. Then he shifted on top of me, and my breath hitched, and the only thought hanging on in my mind was that there was really nothing more than a nightshirt between us, and damned if that wasn't all it took to make everything click together in my head.

My hands stuttered to a stop right where they were, and _sweet Lord, please,_ I thought, not knowing whether I was praying for the boy to stay still or to move again just like that. But before all, I prayed that Ezra was too innocent or too deeply asleep to take notice, or that he was at least accustomed enough to bed-sharing that he'd think no ill intent behind the fact that I was suddenly rousing.

An achingly long moment passed with Ezra's breathing the only sound in the room, and very slowly, my fear began to subside. He seemed blissfully unaware, the sweet boy, making no move to get up. He settled himself more firmly into my arms, even burying his face in the crook of my neck. And, shamefully, I couldn't help but think that maybe he wouldn't take notice if I held him just a little tighter, if I let my legs move just a little farther apart with him between them. If I pretended, only for a moment.

"Thank you," Ezra sighed, his warm breath tickling the bare skin at my collar.

And that was where he kissed me.

Just above the collarbone, too soft to even be felt at first. Open-mouthed and hot. His tongue traced a circle on my skin.

"Ezra?" I wasn't even certain I'd said it aloud, but he startled.

He tensed up, his muscles going rigid under my hands, and without thinking I began petting him once again, smooth skin sliding underneath my palms, just a little damp with sweat now. I suddenly couldn't bear not to touch his hair just one time, and when I did, all I could think was how soft it was between my fingers, and how good he smelled. How sharp his jaw felt pressing against my chest, how warm his skin felt.

And how hard he was.

Oh Lord, the boy was even harder than I was. I could feel him right below my left hip, and when I moved, my leg sliding an inch or so to one side, I heard Ezra breathe in sharp and quick.

My heart took on another couplet of quick dance steps. "Ezra."

I waited, one hand in his hair and the other on his back, our bodies pressed together with more force than gravity should have allowed. For what seemed like an eternity in heartbeats, every inch of my skin began stirring to life, and then I felt Ezra kiss me again, right under my jaw, whispering, "Oren." The sound of my name on his lips made something hot burst painfully in my belly as if I'd been gut-shot. No one was ever supposed to know...

"It's all right," Ezra murmured against my neck.

I felt cool air waft over my skin and realized that Ezra was pulling down the sheet and rucking up my nightshirt. Soft fingertips brushed over me almost hesitantly, and I shook. His hand slid up my side, over my chest, toying with a pap and making it tighten up.

"Ezra..." God knows I should have been appalled by the weakness in my voice, the naked desperation. There was smaller and smaller doubt in my mind where this could be leading, but I still couldn't bring myself to believe it.

"I'm not a virgin with men," Ezra said, so casually that it would have shocked my sensibilities even if he weren't doing what he was doing.

"That's not the point." My voice was barely a croak.

"I see." Ezra said it carefully, as though he really didn't see at all. "What is the point then, Oren?"

I cursed him under my breath and damned myself. "This isn't right." I fixed my hand to Ezra's shoulder but couldn't bring myself to push. "The Bible says..."

What was meant to follow never came, however, as Ezra wriggled up and slid his hips against my own, his eyes cast down. He did it again, slowly pressing his hips down harder, and my eyes screwed shut in the face of just how good it felt and the thought of how much better it might go on to be.

My hands slid down Ezra's sides, getting a hold on his hips. To hold him still. To make stop him, I told myself.

I knew the span of my own hands, though. I knew how slim that boy's hips were, and that my splayed hands would slip between our bodies.

God, how I wanted to touch him there. My hands trembled. "I have a reputation in this town," was all I could think to say.

Ezra did meet my eyes then, once, quickly, and he suddenly looked older than his years. "I wouldn't be indiscreet, Oren," he said quietly. "Not after what you've done for me."

His words sounded sweet, and the sure weight of him felt even sweeter. And, I told myself, he wasn't a virgin. And he was pulling the sheet right out of the way. And he was bracing his hands on my chest.

I don't think I'd ever wanted anything quite so badly in my entire life, and I had to wonder what I'd done to offend the Lord, that He'd lay this pretty young man in my arms when it was so very wrong.

"Hush," Ezra said. "I've got you."

Then it was taken out of my hands, because Ezra lay right down on top of me, his hands moving over me, his lips hovering right above mine.

It was that kiss that finally made it real, the soft, wet press of Ezra's mouth. Because I had kissed a score of women in my time, some that I'd tumbled and some that I hadn't. I kissed every woman who ever wanted to kiss me up until my wedding day, always hoping that it would make me feel whatever it was that other men felt when they kissed their sweethearts.

None of them had ever felt like this. Not a one, not since a stolen afternoon with Francis O'Neal when I was too young to know any better, and even those shameful memories were pale in comparison to the feeling of Ezra's tongue tracing the crease between my lips.

I was lost.

I brought one trembling, cold hand to Ezra's cheek, feeling the square cut of a man's jaw and the faint rasp of an evening beard. Not a painted Venetian, but a flesh and blood American boy, hot and hard, and damn the consequences, I couldn't stop myself.

The bed frame rattled as I rolled the both of us over, and when Ezra wrapped his naked legs around my waist, I knew that was the point where, were anyone to walk in, it would be five to ten years of hard labor if they didn't lynch me first. So I closed my eyes tight before kissing him hard, and the miserable linen of my nightshirt chafed me as I desperately ground him down into the bed.

Ezra moaned softly, the sound muffled against my mouth. I could feel him tremble as his hands scrabbled over me. Not a virgin. Sweet Lord. I wasn't sure whether to feel envy or pity for the first man to meet a determined Ezra Simpson.

"Maybe just...not all of it?" His voice was surprising bashful, if colored by rue.

I only had an inkling of just what he meant by that, but I certainly wasn't going to press my luck by asking. I only drew back and looked at Ezra's flushed cheeks and his wet lips, and then I dropped a chaste kiss on his brow.

"You just tell me when to stop, and I will. I swear it."

Had I ever seen the boy smile so sweetly? Too sweetly, maybe, and I had to kiss it away.

Ezra pressed back every bit as fiercely, clinging like a limpet when I kissed him again and again, hungry in a way that, up until now, I thought had passed me by. It was then that it truly settled upon me, the knowledge of what I was doing, of what I was going to do. Right there, right then, and Ezra's mouth tasted like fire, and I knew I was going to find out what the rest of him tasted like.

I pulled out from the clasp of his legs and sat back on my heels to get rid of my bothersome nightshirt once and for all. I chanced one glance at him in the firelight, and that anxious smile of his was enough to carry me through the awkwardness of uncovering myself.

Ezra sat up and reached for me the second I was bare. No judgment, only bold, wet kisses over my chest. Soft sucking that gradually grew harder, as though he could guess that I had never had it done to me before. He bit; I groaned. And, twining my fingers in his hair, the one thought that overwhelmed me was the injustice of it all.

I had never known. No one had ever told me how good it could be.

The gratitude I felt for that boy in that moment welled up in my chest, and I let Ezra roll me over again and climb on top of me. For the first time outside of my dreams, another man's hand was on my cock, and the feeling of it stole away my breath and speech.

Both hands cupped my face for a moment, and then he was wriggling down the length of my body like a slippery fish. Warm, sloppy kisses were smeared along my skin from throat to sternum. Hands trailed down my sides, stopping firmly on my hips.

For a moment I couldn't even begin to fathom where that meandering path was leading. All I knew was that my cock kept brushing up against the crook of his neck, and it felt incredible, Ezra's breath teasing against me. Then I remembered that "cocksucker" was more than just a barroom insult.

Nice young ladies didn't, but it seemed perhaps that nice young men did.

I couldn't recall ever having been so hard, certainly not in the years since my hair had started to gray. A breathy kiss fell into the hollow of my hip.

Then another, somewhere else.

My jaw dropped, and I knew I would go plumb mad if I watched it, but I couldn't make myself look away. Ezra's eyelashes cast soft shadows on his cheeks in the firelight as he licked me, and I shuddered hot and cold to catch a glimpse of the pink tip of his tongue. Then, just when I thought it couldn't possibly get any better, Ezra's lips stretched right around me, and his hand wrapped around the rest of it, and the heat damn near killed me.

I had never pictured it like that, if I had thought about it at all. Not the motion, nor the tightness, nor the urgent insistence of it. I choked on the sounds in my throat, and Ezra opened his eyes and gazed up at me, soft and pleased, as though he didn't know that he had just broken me.

I was laid bare: looking down at myself, looking down at Ezra's mouth, stroking Ezra's cheek and feeling myself through it.

"Ezra..."

And when he chuckled—oh God, he laughed with my cock in his mouth—I spilled my seed without warning, right into his mouth with his tongue still stroking me, and he swallowed it down with a quiet moan.

"Oren," he sighed, when he had let me slip, and he wrapped his arms around me and pillowed his head on my stomach.

For a long moment, I was too struck to move. The difference...it was like the difference between making do for yourself and lying with a woman. I couldn't trust myself to say a word. It was suddenly quiet as a church, except for the rain. Very nearly holy, if saying something like that weren't enough to bring down the lightning.

Then Ezra's hips began to move. I watched his face for a moment, his eyes squeezing shut, a tiny drop of pearly white poised on his lower lip. Finally, I gathered the sense to tug on his arm and pull him up.

I laid him out, smoothing him down, sculpting him. My hands were shaking as I put them on his chest, smooth and flat with his heartbeat pounding out at me. I pressed a kiss in the middle of his breast, then another, and lost my shyness when he sighed.

If I was a little clumsy with him, that first time, it was not for any lack of care, and I'd like to think I was quick on the uptake. Ezra was...he was all over me, putting my hands there and there, and when he lay back, it wasn't like a woman, because he was pulling me down along with him, always pulling me closer. Always closer, as though he couldn't possibly get near enough.

"You've made an old man very happy," I tell him. Because you can't tell someone you love them when you've only known them for eight days. Maybe you can't ever tell another man you love him, when you've done this with him.

"You're not so old," Ezra says firmly, breathing softly against my side. And then he laughs. "Perhaps you'll keep me out of trouble."

I stroke his shoulders and the curls at the nape of his neck. "You're just what I needed," I say. "You're perfect."

* * *

And, you know, he was. We were.

Despite all that would come after, no matter how hard I've thought on it, that month has remained the happiest of my life. Like seeing color for the first time or gorging on oranges and cake on Christmas morning. Delirious, in a dizzying way that's left me sick and aching for four years since.

Every morning at Fort Laramie, I woke up to find Ezra stretched out on his belly beside me, sometimes with an arm thrown over my chest. He was a sound sleeper, or else he held me in whatever passed for his trust; he never stirred when I would leave the bed and always slept through my puttering around the room washing, shaving, and dressing.

The days were full of sweet, trifling discoveries after the shock of the first had faded. I figured out that Ezra woke up best with a soft hand on his back and a kiss on the neck and his name crooned softly in his ear. Those little things could mean the difference between a groaning head stuck under the pillow and a sleepy but pleased young man trying to pull me back into bed.

He would send me off to work with a lingering kiss and an hour later come sauntering into the courthouse, washed and fed and smelling so good. I spent a good part of the day just trying to put that scent out of my head. Ezra turned out to be far better a worker than I could have hoped for, smart as a whip. He had a head for numbers and a memory like a steel trap, and digging through the mess of old tallies and treaties would have taken a damned sight longer if Ezra hadn't the knack of fishing out just the document that I needed before I'd even asked for it.

We worked alone together for the most part, with Andy bustling in from time to time with coffee or a question. It was peaceful. I got used to the sound of Ezra's breathing, the practiced way he had of shuffling the stacks of paperwork into the right order like he would a deck of cards; and whenever he had a question, he'd set the paper down in front of me and stand pressed up behind me. And, one afternoon three weeks after we met, I leaned my head back against Ezra's chest right there in the office, and Ezra smiled down at me and quickly ran his fingers along my neck.

I knew then, at that moment, that I wanted him with me forever. I finally worked up the courage to tell him as much a few nights later, after we'd spent the better part of an hour warming each other up in bed, when the two of us were still and sticky and tangled up together. Ezra was combing his fingers through my chest hair, smiling a smug and satisfied little smile.

"I could do this forever," I said.

A muffled moan with a question mark at the end of it was the only reply.

I cleared my throat. "I said, I could do this forever."

Ezra got up on his elbow then and looked down at me with an arched eyebrow. "Really?" he drawled, and I knew that look on his face. "I had no idea. I think three hours has been my personal best."

I laughed out loud. Ezra could do that to me, make me laugh so that all the knots in my belly uncoiled at once. "Wiseacre. What I meant was, have you ever been to Hagersville?"

"Hagersville..." I'd caught him off guard. "I don't believe so."

"It's maybe a hundred and fifty miles southwest of here, nice town. It's where I work, most of the time. It's where I live."

"Mm?" His voice didn't give up anything.

"I was thinking, you won't be squared up with that twenty dollars before my business is done here."

Ezra chuckled. "Might that be because you're paying me a pitiful pittance of a dollar a week?"

"It's the going rate, for board and food besides," I said a mite defensively before strengthening my resolve. "But I was thinking, I could use a secretary back home. There's a real nice boarding house in town. The owner owes me a favor."

He paused a moment. "That so?"

"It wouldn't be so boring as all that," I told him, barely hearing myself over the thundering in my chest. "I often ride out to a dusty little hellhole called Four Corners to visit my son. Full of the bad element. You'd love it."

"Well, now, that's a very tempting offer, Oren," Ezra said, and I thought I heard the hint of a smile in his voice before he settled his head in the crook of my neck and tucked in to sleep. I stroked his hair for a long while, unable to drift off for my pounding heart and idiotic grin.

Two days later he was looking at me down the barrel of a gun.

* * *

He knew my secret. Figured it out soon enough.

"You've never done this before, have you?" Ezra asks as I'm licking his belly clean. He's stretched out like a cat, practically purring.

I pause, eyes fixed on his abdomen. His skin looks so pale and clear that sometimes I expect my breath to fog it up whenever he lets me near him. "Sure I have," I say, as coolly as I can. "There was last night. Both times. And the night before that."

Ezra's stomach tightens up. "But not before that?" he asks softly.

"No."

"Oh."

"Yes," I say, and I kiss him right above his navel.

I wish I could say I'd known his.

I wish I could say I saw it coming. It would be a better story, wouldn't it, if I'd had some premonition the morning of our last day together? Maybe if I stand back and look at the whole of it, there were a few things that had niggled at me. Like how Ezra would talk about places he'd been two years ago, but not what he'd been up to two months ago. How he'd grown up "here and there," and had people "all over." How he'd never mentioned holding a trade, and the way he was always pulling a deck of cards out of nowhere and shuffling them around to soothe his nerves.

But it never seemed very important, and Ezra was good at distracting me. That morning was like all the others before it: a little bit better than the last. I woke him up with a lazy tumble, and afterwards we reheated some coffee and toasted bread and cheese in the fireplace for breakfast. I sent him down to the post office to check for any word from Evie, and I took my time walking down to the courthouse because the day was bright and chilly, just the right sort of weather to wake up in.

I knew something was wrong when I found Andy already waiting for me, sitting behind my desk. He wasn't smiling.

"We gotta talk about your chum Simpson." His voice was more serious than I'd ever heard it in our fifteen years of friendship.

He pushed a single piece of paper across to me. Cheap pulp among all the sheaves of government-grade documents. A poster for a wanted man.

Ezra Stanton. Wanted in Salt Lake City.

Fraud.

Extortion.

Bodily harm.

Conspiracy.

Theft.

The sketch wasn't nearly so pretty as the Youth in Field.

"What are we going to do about this, Oren?" Andy asked softly. "He seems like a good kid, but he's not going to last two shakes if one of my men finds him before we do."

"Stay here," I told him, and maybe he heard me. I was already out the door and into the street.

The post office? No. There were no gawking onlookers. He'd be out of there already. Had anyone seen him? Was he running? He wasn't armed. Did he know?

Yes.

It's funny the things you remember. There were eighteen stairs up to our room. A painting of a fruit bowl next to our door. The doorknob had a tendency to stick. The brass was still warm. Ezra was lifting a twenty-dollar bill out of my bag when the door swung open.

"Oren?"

Pretend for a minute that there are no names, no faces. Just the facts.

The man reaches for his gun. Maybe it's instinct, but that's neither here nor there. There's a muted click. The boy has a derringer in his hand. It holds two shots.

The man takes one step forward. "You put that gun down, boy, or I swear to God..."

"I'll shoot," the boy says quietly. He shivers. "You know I won't shoot to kill, but I will shoot."

"Like hell you will," the man says.

And the boy shoots.

Three and a half feet to the left of the man, a bullet plows into the foot-thick support beam beside the fireplace, and the man jumps straight up, and the boy jumps out the window, satchel in hand. Footsteps patter across the roof.

By the time the man follows him out onto the side stairs, the boy is out of sight.

That was it. That was all.

Ezra left a crumpled-up wanted poster on the bed, lifted from the post office. He left that twenty-dollar bill on the floor and a bullet hole that was enough for Andy to convince his superiors that I hadn't let Ezra go willingly. He left his goddamned socks in the dresser.

He left me.

"See you in the morning," Ezra murmurs as he's drifting off to sleep.

"Of course," I say, and I stroke his hair. "Sweet dreams."

* * *

Where does it go from there?

I finished my work in Fort Laramie with Andy by my side for the rest of it. He never brought up Ezra's name again, and I'm forever grateful to him for it. I went home to Hagersville, and Evie got back a week later, full of stories of how little Billy was talking now, and how Steven and Mary were thinking about starting up a newspaper.

Might-have-beens are surely messy, but they're all I've got. I've played out a conversation in my head a thousand times. I imagine running into Ezra in the street, catching his sleeve in a crowd. I imagine him showing up before the bench, wearing four years and a new name.

"Would you have turned me in?" Ezra asks. I can imagine just how he would sound, and how he'd theatrically jam his hands deep in his pockets.

And I don't lie to him. "I don't know. I really don't."

I ended up riding out to the tents between Hagersville and Porter's Pass three years after Wyoming. The night after the telegram from Four Corners was delivered. Evie didn't know yet. Evie was sleeping. I rode out to the tents, and it was dark. Bathhouse rumor had it that the men there could tell a one-dollar bill from a ten by touch on a moonless night. I bought myself time with a boy who said his name was Paul. Blonde hair and blue eyes, long and lanky. It wasn't like how I remembered. The boy never got hard, and I couldn't finish, so I tipped him and left and was sick on the way home. The next morning, hungover, I had to tell Evie that our son was dead.

I wondered for the first time, then, if there really was such a thing as justice. Or if there's only change. I'm not the same man I was four years ago, and who's to say what Ezra was on his way to being. Someone I liked, for certain. Maybe someone I could have loved more than anything, if I'd had the chance.

Maybe that's all justice really is.

I often travel down the long road to Four Corners. It's a near-endless trip, full of lonesome nights. Good for remembering. There's talk of them taking on a new circuit court judge for that district, and I've thought about throwing my hat in the ring so that I have more excuses to visit. I go to see Mary, of course. I bring Billy for visits and try each time to convince her to come back with us. I go for Steven's sake.

But I always find myself looking around the saloons, at the poker tables and at the bars. I always find myself remembering that night, when I made my proposal—

_"I often ride out to a dusty little hellhole called Four Corners to visit my son. Full of the bad element. You'd love it."_

—and I think, maybe one of these days, Ezra is going to be ready to be found.

And what then?

Cuff him.

Lock him up.

Hold a gun to him if need be, just get him in one place long enough to talk to him.

He still owes me a debt, and I think that's enough to make him listen. I would sit down with him someplace quiet, just him and me. I think I could tell him I forgive him. I think I could tell him a little story.

How once upon a time there was this man, and a boy...

Maybe he has some idea how it ends.


End file.
